Orson Scott Card - Ender Wiggin 1 Enders game

E NDERS G AME

Orson Scott Card

For Geoffrey,
who makes me remember
how young and how old
children can be

C ONTENTS

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Portions of this book were recounted in my first published science fiction story, Enders Game, in the August 1977 Analog, edited by Ben Boya; his faith in me and this story are the foundation of my career.

Harriet McDougal of Tor is that rarest of editorsone who understands a story and can help the author make it exactly what he meant it to be. They dont pay her enough. Harriets task was made more than a little easier, however, because of the excellent work of my resident editor, Kristine Card. I dont pay her enough, either.

I am grateful also to Barbara Boya, who has been my friend and agent through thin and, sometimes, thick; and to Tom Doherty, my publishers who let me talk him into doing this book at the ABA in Dallas, which shows either his superb judgment or how weary one can get at a convention.

I NTRODUCTION

It makes me a little uncomfortable, writing an introduction to Enders Game. After all, the book has been in print for six years now, and in all that time, nobody has ever written to me to say, You know, Enders Game was a pretty good book, but you know what it really needs? An introduction! And yet when a novel goes back to print for a new hardcover edition, there ought to be something new in it to mark the occasion (something besides the minor changes as I fix the errors and internal contradictions and stylistic excesses that have bothered me ever since the novel first appeared). So be assured-the novel stands on its own, and if you skip this intro and go straight to the story, I not only wont stand in your way, Ill even agree with you!

The novelet Enders Game was my first published science fiction. It was based on an ideathe Battle Roomthat came to me when I was sixteen years old. I had just read Isaac Asimovs Foundation tr ilogy, which was (more or less) an extrapolation of the ideas in Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, applied to a galaxy-wide empire in some far future time.

The novel set me, not to dreaming, but to thinking, which is Asimovs most extraordinary ability as a fiction writer. What would the future be like? How would things change? What would remain the same? The premise of Foundation seemed to be that even though you might change the props and the actors, the play of human history is always the same. And yet that fundamentally pessimistic premise (you mean well never change?) was tempered by Asimovs idea of a group of human beings who, not through genetic change, but through learned skills, are able to understand and heal the minds of other people.

It was an idea that rang true with me, perhaps in part because of my Mormon upbringing and beliefs: Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people.

Those were some of the ideas that played through my mind as I read Foundation, curled on my beda thin mattress on a slab of plywood, a bed my father had made for mein my basement bedroom in our little rambler on 650 East in Orem, Utah. And then, as so many science fiction readers have done over the years, I felt a strong desire to write stories that would do for others what Asimovs story had done for me.

In other genres, that desire is usually expressed by producing thinly veiled rewrites of the great work: Tolkiens disciples far too often simply rewrite Tolkien, for example. In science fiction, however, the whole point is that the ideas are fresh and startling and intriguing; you imitate the great ones, not by rewriting their stories, but. rather by creating stories that are just as startling and new.

But new in what way? Asimov was a scientist, and approached every field of human knowledge in a scientific mannerassimilating data, combining it in new and startling ways, thinking through the implications of each new idea. I was no scientist, and unlikely ever to be one, at least not a real scientistnot a physicist, not a chemist, not a biologist, not even an engineer. I had no gift for mathematics and no great love for it, either. Though I relished the study of logic and languages, and virtually inhaled histories and biographies, it never occurred to me at the time that these were just as valid sources of science fiction stories as astronomy or quantum mechanics.

How, then, could I possibly conic up with a science fiction idea? What. did I actually know about anything?

At that time my older brother Bill was in the army, stationed at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City; he was nursing a hip-to-heel cast from a bike-riding accident, however, and came home on weekends. It was then that he had met his future wife, Laura Dene Low, while attending a church meeting on the BYU campus; and it was Laura who gave me Foundation to read. Perhaps, then, it was natural for my thoughts to turn to things military.

To me, though, the military didnt mean the Vietnam War, which was then nearing its peak of American involvement. I had no experience of that, except for Bills stories of the miserable life in basic training, the humiliation of officers candidate school, and his lonely but in many ways successful life as a noncom in Korea. Far more deeply rooted in my mind was my experience, five or six years earlier, of reading Bruce Cattons three-volume Army of the Potomac. I remembered so well the stories of the commanders in that warthe struggle to find a Union general capable of using McClellans magnificent army to defeat Lee and Jackson and Stuart, and then, finally, Grant, who brought death to far too many of his soldiers, but also made their deaths mean something, by grinding away at Lee, keeping him from dancing and maneuvering out of reach. It was because of Cattons history that I had stopped enjoying chess, and had to revise the rules of Risk in order to play itI had come to understand something of war, and not just because of the conclusions Catton himself had reached. I found meanings of my own in that history.

I learned that history is shaped by the use of power, and that different people, leading the same army, with, therefore, approximately the same power, applied it so differently that the army seemed to change from a pack of noble fools at Fredericksburg to panicked cowards melting away at Chancellorsville, then to the grimly determined, stubborn soldiers who held the ridges at Gettysburg, and then, finally, to the disciplined, professional army that ground Lee to dust in Grants long campaign. It wasnt the soldiers who changed. It was the leader. And even though I could not then have articulated what I understood of military leadership, I knew that I did understand it. I understood, at levels deeper than speech, how a great military leader imposes his will on his enemy, and makes his own army a willing extension of himself.

So one morning, as my Dad drove me to Brigham Young High School along Carterville Road in the heavily wooded bottoms of the Provo River, I wondered: How would you train soldiers for combat in the future? I didnt bother thinking of new land-based weapons systemswhat was on my mind, after Foundation, was space. Soldiers and commanders would have to think very differently in space, because the old ideas of up and down simply wouldnt apply anymore. I had read in Nordhoffs and Halls history of World War I flying that it was very hard at first for new pilots to learn to look above and below them rather than merely to the right and left, to find the enemy approaching them in the air. How much worse, then, would it be to learn to think with no up and down at all?

The essence of training is to allow error without consequence. Three-dimensional warfare would need to be practiced in an enclosed space, so mistakes wouldnt send trainees flying off to Jupiter. It would need to offer a way to practice shooting without risk of injury; and yet trainees who were hit would need to be disabled, at least temporarily. The environment would need to be changeable, to simulate the different conditions of warfarenear a ship, in the midst of debris, near tiny asteroids. And it would need to have some of the confusion of real battle, so that the play-combat didnt evolve into something as rigid and formal as the meaningless marching and maneuvers that still waste an astonishing amount of a trainees precious hours in basic training in our modem military.